The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books (Princeton University Press))

by Benn Steil

The years 1880–1913 constitute the great era of laissez-faire in world economic history—the reign of the classical gold standard, in which governments around the globe had allowed an unprecedented degree of economic activity within and between their nations to be regulated by the market-driven